Wednesday, February 7

BPM (Beats per Minute)

Premiere Engagement!

Co-presented by Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival

Friday, February 2 – Thursday February 8

(2017) dir Robin Campillo w/Arnaud Valois, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz, Ariel Borenstein, Félix Maritaud, Aloïse Sauvage [140 min; DCP]
In Paris in the early 1990s, a group of activists goes to battle for those stricken with HIV/AIDS, taking on sluggish government agencies and major pharmaceutical companies in bold, invasive actions. The organization is ACT UP, and its members, many of them gay and HIV-positive, embrace their mission with a literal life-or-death urgency. Amid rallies, protests, fierce debates and ecstatic dance parties, the newcomer Nathan (Valois) falls in love with Sean (Biscayart), the group’s radical firebrand, and their passion sparks against the shadow of mortality as the activists fight for a breakthrough.

Simultaneously a period-piece, a heartbreaking love story, a medical drama, and an activist procedural, BPM is one of the most emotionally gripping films of the year. Undeniably powerful in its ability to connect with the viewer on multiple levels, Campillo doesn’t shy away from the messy details of life, sex, death, or parliamentary procedure but he marries the bad times to transcendent moments of cinematic bliss.

“‘BPM (Beats per Minute)’ is about a movement and a moment and the people in it, and it’s also about two faces in the throng and the alchemy that draws them together. The movie’s a social history, a love story, and a call to arms. It’s very sad and it’s very good.” – Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“‘Beats Per Minute’ is the best film opening in Boston today.” – James Verniere, Boston Herald

“In spite of its historical specificity, BPM never feels like a bulletin from the past. Its immediacy comes in part from the brisk naturalism of the performances and the nimbleness and fluidity of the editing. The characters are so vivid, so real, so familiar that it’s impossible to think of their struggles — and in some cases their deaths — as unfolding in anything but the present tense.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“This multi-character story is the most ambitious, modern-day queer epic since Patrice Chereau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1999). Campillo brings back the tragic, emotional past so that it teaches about that age with contemporary immediacy.” – Armond White, Out Magazine

“A wrenching love story, set in Paris in the early 1990s, told against the background of ACT-UP AIDS activists fighting for their lives. Ron Campillo’s raw and riveting film musters the emotional power to floor you.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone